


on speaking terms

by zealotarchaeologist



Category: Friends at the Table (Podcast)
Genre: F/F, First Crush, Flirting, Pre-Canon, Rivalry, Secret Samol 2020
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-01
Updated: 2021-02-01
Packaged: 2021-03-18 14:13:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29119527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zealotarchaeologist/pseuds/zealotarchaeologist
Summary: At the precocious age of eight, Clementine Kesh tries for the first time to shove Gucci Garantine to the ground.
Relationships: Gucci Garantine/Clementine Kesh
Comments: 5
Kudos: 16





	on speaking terms

**Author's Note:**

> my secret samol gift for @AGLENNCO on twitter! their prompts were SO good, the delightful prompt i chose was "Clem having a big old crush and just having so much trouble with it. Like dealing with it as well as that post that says "when I was 7 i had a crush on a girl in my class & didn't know how to deal w it so I wrote her a letter that just said “get out of my school“" which is truly one of my all time favorite posts so i hope i captured that vibe.
> 
> one note: the idea of a 7-k day being an important thing/the age of majority in the principality comes from one of the worldbuilding drawing maps eps--technically she's NOT underage smoking bc she's of age it's just that also like. principality ages and times are WEIRD and if i try to do the math on it my brain hurts so don't think too hard about it.

At the precocious age of eight, Clementine Kesh tries for the first time to shove Gucci Garantine to the ground.

It is, in its way, a long time coming.

It has been several months since Gucci Garantine joined her and her fellow noble children at their lessons. She could afford private tutors, of course, any of them could. But a good Kesh child is a politician already, charming and polite and already making the tenuous connections that will give them leverage over the other prominent families for their rest of their lives.

Clementine has, thus far, not succeeded at any of that. None of it comes easy to her—not etiquette nor history nor piano nor the affections of her peers.

Gucci, on the other hand, seems to do everything effortlessly. Which is unfair. It’s her palace and her tutors and her mother who wants her to be properly socialized. She’s the one in line for the throne, not Gucci. She should be the best in everything. Everyone is supposed to love her, should be waiting on her hand and foot.

Instead she is sullen and friendless, as overlooked by her peers as she is by her mother. Worse still, her performance has only gotten worse since her little problem started. She doesn’t want to _apply herself_ , she wants to know what trick it is Gucci does, what special advantage it is that lets her do well. Maybe she’s simply stolen something that should have been Clementine’s.

She sulks about it for a while. Would cry a little, too, only her mother won’t abide her acting like a baby. She is not a baby now, and so she handles things the Kesh way. “Our lives revolve around information,” her mother says, and so it is information that she gathers.

To summarize, Gucci Garantine is the only daughter and heir of her house, which is mid-level and considered of little import outside of its ties to Brightline. Military, then, and not proper politicians. Compared to Clementine, she might as well be an uneducated pauper. And yet that doesn’t explain why she has received top aptitude scoring in nearly every discipline their cohort has been exposed to. Why the teasing of their companions does not touch her—why she can direct it with a glance instead.

“What you do with information, daughter,” Crysanth tells her breezily. She has not once in the conversation spared Clementine a glance. “Is up to you.”

That leaves Clementine with something of a dilemma. The facts she has, unfortunately, do nothing to solve her problem nor even to diagnose it. It is necessary (the Kesh way) to gather more information, and so she begins to spend the better part of her time in their lessons staring, and listening, and studying the minute details of her enemy’s face.

But there comes a time, as always, when her patience wears thin and more direct methods of study must be employed. And thus: the shoving.

It is a wholly unsuccessful maneuver. Gucci, nearly a year older than her and a little taller as well, does not budge.

“Um.” She says. “What are you doing?”

For some reason that’s the thing that makes it unbearable, the idea that her fury is somehow beneath Gucci’s notice. Clementine’s tiny, frustrated mind can take no more.

“I _hate_ you.” She declares, with all the gravitas that the four-foot-tall heiress of Stel Kesh can possess.

Gucci Garantine frowns at her, small and serious. “Okay.”

Clementine shoves her again. This time it goes a little better, and she stumbles to hold her ground. “I said I hate you!”

“Fine, then I hate you back.” There’s a reaction, finally, a subtle change in that frown that makes it something more serious. She’s worthy of attention, now. No backing down.

“Get out of _my_ palace.” Clementine hisses, working up the courage to push her again.

Gucci plants her feet. She crosses her arms. She gets a look in her eyes that will someday become very familiar to Clementine: a challenge.

“Make me.” She declares.

Only a few moments pass before they’re forcibly separated by their tutor, but it is long enough for Clementine to give a good effort. She forsakes the idea of doing things _the Kesh way_ , far busier with biting and scratching and pulling at hair.

From then on it is as written history. If she can’t have Gucci Garantine out of her way, well, she can at least put up a fight. Though she doesn’t sink to such unbecoming levels again (mostly) there is nothing they won’t compete at, no subject too boring, no matter too petty. It escapes her understanding, at that age, that this is the most attentive to their lessons Clementine has ever been in her life.

A year later, when Gucci is the first of the little cohort of young nobility to disappear from their lessons, she knows it is not likely her fault. Of course, it’s not. Kesh families move planets all the time, even the lesser houses. It has nothing to do with her. And she hardly even misses Gucci, anyway.

In the first summer they spend together, Clementine is eleven years old, sulking at being shoved off on some backwater planet in what is, on paper, a lovely vacation. A beautiful retreat, if smaller than her favorite palaces, up in some pristine mountains. Clementine is old enough to understand the truth: her mother does not want her around.

The benefit of being without her mother, of course, is that she can express her frustration at this understanding. None of the staff here know her, and all of them seem too frightened of her to stop the little Kesh princess from ruining things or screaming in the hallways. As loud as she wants and at all hours.

For the first day, she is miserably lonely. She can bark orders, of course, and even at her age they’re followed without question, but no one talks to her. No one goes near her unless it’s necessary.

Clementine embraces her newfound reputation as a terror. She will be the tyrant of this manor, will rule over it with an iron fist. She decides this in a small dining room, a croquet mallet in hand, ready to take it out on the fine porcelain.

The sound of a door opening catches her just about to swing. She whips around, ready to unleash her fury on whoever had _dared_ disturb her, whichever meaningless nobody has been sent to attend to her, dressed in all red and--

“Gucci?” She blinks, stunned out of her frenzy. “What are you doing here?”

“I live here?” Gucci Garantine says, like she’s asked a stupid question. One hand on her hip, she looks at Clem like the thorn in her side she used to be, as if nothing has changed, as if there’s nothing odd about suddenly seeing her again. “For now, I mean, it belongs to the Brightlines, but we’re watching it, and they told me there would be visitors but I didn’t expect…” She trails off, taking in, suddenly, the state of Clementine and the destruction she’s planning to wreak. “You definitely shouldn’t be doing that.”

“I can do what I want.” She snaps, awkwardly, but the bubble of her fury has already burst.

“Okay,” Gucci rolls her eyes and offers her hand. When Clementine is too slow to take it, she shrugs and smooths her neatly pleated shorts down instead. “You don’t _want_ to be doing that, though. Come with me.”

She glowers, ready to snap back that there’s no way Gucci Garantine could understand anything about what she wants. No way she could understand anything about Clementine at all. She’s nobody but a smug and irritating little girl. Nothing has changed in the slightest since the last time they saw each other.

But Gucci has turned and ventured off before Clementine can even gather what she wants to say and put the other girl in her place. It’s for that, and for no other reason that she follows.

Clementine trails her out the patio door, over a neatly trimmed lawn clearly meant as the croquet court, and then—beyond the sight of the manor into a thicket of pine trees, getting more dirt and needles on her shoes than is strictly proper. Down a hill and through the trees, then, Gucci always a few feet ahead. The branches don’t seem to scrape at her.

Sick of following and of falling behind, Clementine charges forward, tripping over herself to break through the treeline. The lake that stares back at her when she emerges is too pristinely beautiful to be anything less than man-made. Even so, there’s something more wild to it than the gardens she’s used to, something she doesn’t quite know what to do with.

It’s pretty, sure, but Gucci is ignoring it and forging on. Clementine hikes up her skirt to keep up, chases her down to the shore where she gestures, pleased, at a long dock. A few little boats are tied up alongside, clearly maintained by servants. Gucci selects one, a small canoe clearly made to suit her and fit her size, and wastes no time unwinding the rope that secures it to the dock. It’s a little annoying, already, how she knows Clementine will follow.

“Won’t we get in trouble?” She thinks of wet shoes, stained skirts. Her mother does not yell at her, exactly. She is simply disappointed. Always.

“Uh, no?” Gucci cocks her head. “It’s our lake. Who’s going to stop us?”

She doesn’t have a good answer for that. So she gathers her skirt in one hand and lowers herself gingerly into the boat. It’s not the first time she’s done this—rowing is one of the physical activities her mother will permit, and though she can’t properly join a Kesh team yet, her private lessons have already gone much better than her attempts at ballet.

Still, with her oar in hand, she hesitates. Gucci shoots her a pitying look. “You do know how to row, right? I heard you were going to start formally next year.”

Clementine’s head spins. “I—you—yes, but—”

“That’s good,” Gucci continues, not paying attention to her flustered state. “It’ll be more fun if I have someone to compete against.” And without giving her a chance to process that, she pushes them off the little dock and out onto the lake.

It’s rocky at first, getting into rhythm and making their way out into the water. The boat sways between them. But soon enough they’re moving in tandem, gliding their way to freedom.

It’s awkward at first, too. They share the strange manners of those forced to grow up too fast, bred and trained in the proper dignities. Clementine does not, as a rule, have friends. She barely even has peers at this age, whisked instead from one tutor to the next, all of whom report up to her mother on her progress or lack thereof.

But as they row, as she watches the manor house shrink smaller and smaller in the distance, the strangeness falls away between them. No time to reach for the proper words when her arms are burning with effort and the nearby sun is making her sweat.

It’s the perfect day for it, warm and so clear that the water is like a mirror. They cut across it in refracting lines, quick and free. The cool, pine-scented air striking at their faces.

Gucci was right, she realizes. She does want to be doing this. It really does make her feel better. She hasn’t thought about her mother in the slightest. There’s just no room to think about anything but her next stroke, nothing to focus on but the motion of her arms and making sure she matches them to her partner’s.

They tire in unison too, after a while, and together they shift from speed into idleness, simply drifting and paddling as it suits them. They talk a little, about nothing, but more than that they merely lay lazily silent, floating in peace. The sun is directly overhead. She knows she’ll be burnt later but right now, it’s nice and warm.

Every time Clem glances over at Gucci, she smiles back in a way they makes her feel sick. She doesn’t understand yet, at that age, what that feeling is or what it means. But she senses danger on some instinctive level—inherited, maybe. Feels her stomach flip, her chest tighten. She hates it. Maybe she just hates Gucci, still.

“What are you looking at?” Gucci smiles at her, the gap of a lost tooth in her grin.

Clementine panics.

Her oar hits the surface of the lake with a speed and vehemence that surprises both of them, kicking up a sheet of water directly into Gucci’s face before she can move.

“You--!” For a moment she blinks, drenched and stunned. Then her eyes meet Clem’s with that fierce and glittering challenge, and Clementine knows for certain she is in danger.

Clementine Kesh’s seven thousandth day of life in the splendor of the Divine Principality is nothing short of decadent. No expense is spared. On the makeshift Kesh capital of Lenaphon IV, her mother parades her through one ballroom after another. By the second hour the faces have started to blur together, but she maintains her perfect social graces. Crysanth does not seem to actually notice her, of course, except as a particularly nice and useful bit of furniture. As the evening draws on, eventually she’d shooed away so that her mother can talk real politics. So it’s no different from any of her other birthdays, really.

Clementine mills about aimlessly for a while, taking in the marble and the crystal and the people clad in every shade of white, like a fog rolled through the palace. None of them pay her any mind. Clementine bites down the desire to do something drastic. Instead she turns down one hallway, then another, out onto one of the many open balconies where the guests had stood earlier in the day, admiring the palace gardens. It’s grown too cool now for comfort, and so Clementine remains there, unable to block out the static sound of chatter from inside.

Something horrible roils in her, twisting over and over itself until nothing makes sense. Until it feels like the fine foods and the touch of silk and the braids in her hair and the first legal sip of champagne don’t matter. Don’t mean anything. The gardens she’s looking over don’t mean anything. There is the sense, suddenly, of being in a dollhouse. It resolves into one of the few times in her life she ever allows herself to think: _I hate this._

“Happy seven-K day.” Comes from somewhere behind her, pleasant and clear over the distant hum of voices. “Congratulations on making it this far.”

Gucci Garantine is leaning against the open double doors to this patio, looking for all the world like she belongs there. Normally, this would have the effect of making Clementine perk up, and then forcefully pretend to be unaffected. Now, she only drapes herself a little more dramatically across the railing, sighing as Gucci comes to join her.

“Not having fun at your own party?”

“I’m bored.”

Gucci hums in agreement, a warm low sound. The sun, beginning to set, paints her face in red light. Clementine straightens up, tries to will her face not to burn. Over the past year, she’s come to understand things a little better. If only a little.

It’s her birthday, though, the only real important one she’ll ever have. The only one that was supposed to belong to her and not to her mother. She’s supposed to get everything she wants. Now is the best chance she’ll ever have.

“I’m _so_ bored,” she repeats, trying to keep her voice even, “I could even kiss you. At least that would be interesting.”

There is a beat of silence. The distant roar of the party. Gucci stares at her, searching.

Then laughs.

The effect is instantly sobering. Even Gucci, her head tossed back, beautiful, could not possibly temper the humiliated rage that simmers under Clementine’s scowling face.

“You’re hilarious. You’re just so desperate to break a rule!”

“Last time I checked, there wasn’t a rule against kissing you.” She hisses back, feels her face heat.

Gucci smirks. “Maybe there should be.”

Clementine falls into a fuming, sullen silence, refusing to speak another word. They stay like that as the sun goes down, its last light bathing the gardens in warm pinks and purples. She is acutely aware that Gucci has not actually refused her offer at all. But it wouldn’t be prudent to bring it up again.

Instead she fidgets aimlessly, picking at the lace that hems her sleeve. The longer she lets the silence go on, the more oppressive it feels. Gucci seems unbothered, watching her contentedly out of the corner of her eye.

There’s one card she’s yet to play, though, in the form of a sleek silver case pilfered from one of her mother’s offices that morning. It sits heavy in the pocket of her dress before she withdraws it with a flourish, letting it catch the evening light. When that garners no reaction, she _clicks_ it open, revealing the long, thin cigarettes her mother favors. Clementine plucks one with careful fingers and lifts it to her mouth, like she’s seen adults do.

All that gets her is a raised eyebrow. “Oh, you smoke now that you’re all grown up?”

Clem glares and pulls the cigarette from between her teeth. “I stole them from my mother’s desk.”

Gucci nods and does not give voice to what they both know—that if she stole anything, it’s only because Crysanth allowed her to. Wanted her to, maybe. There are always more tests.

“Here,” Gucci offers, to quell her building fury. “Let me light you.”

“So _you_ smoke now that you’re all grown up?”

“Sometimes.” She shrugs. “It’s useful for getting interesting conversation out of people.”

“Would you like one, then?”

“I’ll share yours.”

Having not forgotten their earlier conversation, Clem feels a bolt of something in her chest. It spreads when Gucci offers her flame from a red engraved lighter. She leans in, grazing the tip of it—she’s never done this before, but it can’t be that hard, can it?

Clementine raises the cigarette to her lips. If she does this right, she’ll taste Gucci’s lipstick on it next. Concentrating hard, she lets her eyes flutter closed and inhales—

And immediately coughs so hard she drops it, ash scattering on the marble. “That is disgusting,” she snarls, tears at the corners of her eyes.

Gucci can’t help it—she covers her mouth politely but she’s laughing again and yes, Clementine understands now. She remembers, suddenly, that she _hates_ Gucci, doesn’t know how she could ever have been so silly as to mistake it for anything else. It burns in her. There’s no one and nothing more infuriating in the world.

As soon as she’s caught her breath, Clem lunges. Just like she used to when they were younger, one hand planted on the other girl’s shoulder, trying to shove her down.

Gucci stops laughing.

Her eyes narrow as she grabs Clementine’s wrist, freezing her utterly. She’s never done that before. This isn’t how it’s supposed to go—she’s not allowed to touch her like that. Firm but gentle, eyes locked on hers.

“I’m not letting you get away with that anymore.” Gucci scolds, but there’s something soft to her tone that Clementine can’t possibly identify. “You’re an adult, Clem. Use your words. Tell me what you want from me.”

Clementine tries to pull her hand back, but it’s no use. They always were well matched in strength. So she’s left with no option but to stand there, eyes wide and face reddening, her mouth open slightly in search of words that won’t come. “I--” She starts, can’t hear herself think over the sound of her pulse. Gucci must be able to feel it in her wrist, hammering away, a nameless thing trying to escape. She stifles it. “I don’t know.”

Something shifts in the air between them. Gucci drops her hand, her intense stare softening into something pitying. “Well, princess,” she drawls with a slight smile. She turns away, then, before Clementine can gather herself enough to protest, and begins to saunter away to rejoin the party. “Let me know when you figure it out.” She calls back over her shoulder.

And leaves Clementine there, alone and burning still.


End file.
